Marek Halter
By Marek Halter
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Opinion Watching the Revolution, Eyes Wide Open
A strange debate has sprouted up here in France regarding the events in Tunisia and Egypt — especially in Egypt — which the press calls a “debate between intellectuals.” I would say instead that it is a debate between activists and intellectuals, though of course one can be both at the same time. As a…
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News Letter from Ukraine: Facing God at Babi Yar
Babi Yar, who has heard about it? It is here, in the suburbs of Kiev, near the old Jewish cemetery, on September 29, 1941 —Yom Kippur day — that the Einsatzkommando headed by Paul Blobel, an SS colonel, with the help of the Ukrainian police, used machine guns to exterminate the Jewish inhabitants of this…
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News Revisiting Hiroshima, Rethinking the Way We War
Hiroshima. I heard the name for the first time when I was 9, in Kokand, Uzbekistan. Just three months earlier, we had celebrated the victory over Nazism. Stalin had spoken. I heard him on the radio. “I promised you that there would be a celebration in our street, too,” he reminded us. “Here it is.”…
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News A Pope Passes and With Him Dies A Golden Age in Interfaith Relations
FORWARD FORUM I met Pope John Paul II in 1985. We were introduced by his personal secretary, confidante and fellow Pole, Stanislaw Dziwisz. “Hello, my dear compatriot!” the pope greeted me in Polish. “Good morning, Holy Father,” I answered in Polish. “So we are both from Warsaw, aren’t we?” he said. “No,” I replied. “I…
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Opinion From Memory to History
I did not go to Auschwitz. I did not go to Majdanek or Treblinka, or to any other Nazi extermination camp. I remember only the skeletal children agonizing on the sidewalks of the Warsaw Ghetto, their stomachs swelled by hunger. I only discovered Auschwitz later, after the war. I went there with my parents, like…
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